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Re: "treatment treadmill"

Originally Posted by JRG13

and it also seems as an excuse for a lot of noobs to take the 'well I'm treatment free excuse' for not inspecting their hives ever or monitoring for diseases or just not knowing anything about bees in general.

I don't see why that should concern you. Is it your loss or are you wielding a finger?

Re: "treatment treadmill"

It may be appealing to one starting out to not treat, however, if you start out by purchasing your hive from a bee supply catalog, you will soon come to the pages of treatments for this and that disease and pest, so right from the start the beginner is faced with the decision of treating or not, but my thinking is that with limited knowledge the beginner is going to choose to treat in some fashion to try to preserve their investment in bees, unless they are fortunate to have a mentor that helps them choose the better option. Sorry if I offended anybody. John

Re: "treatment treadmill"

If I followed the line of thought in post #118 and applied it to me, then I would have to admit that even though I adhered to treatments for the first 35 or so years of my keeping bees and was therefore enlightened about bees in general, I have become dumber the last 5 years since going the non-treatment route. John

Re: "treatment treadmill"

I feel stuck to the treadmill because of my location, my lack of small or natural cell size frames, and the fact that I care for all of my hives and don't want any to die. I know I can't escape my bees dying forever, but I want to minimize it. I might try treatment free when I have enough natural cell size frames.

Re: "treatment treadmill"

Originally Posted by sammyjay

don't want any to die.

That's what sticks you, not the rest. You can't have natural without death. When people talk about natural selection, you rarely hear about what happens to the ones that aren't selected for success. In nature, the slow wildebeest doesn't get to retire on a farm upstate. He comes to a rather grisly end and often before getting to grow up.

I am not saying any of this in any sort of negative way, it's just the fact of the matter. The decision as always is yours.

Re: "treatment treadmill"

Originally Posted by Solomon Parker

That's what sticks you, not the rest. You can't have natural without death.

This is what makes such a problem for very small backyard beekeepers to be treatment free. Even if you buy queens from a breeder that does all the selection stuff possible in his mothers, the daughters won't always be the best survivors, you'll get a slow wildebeest every now and then. So eventually if you have 1-2 hives and that's all you want or can handle, you will be almost assuredly become beeless and be starting over. So being truly treatment free I believe involves resigning oneself to one of two options....either have many hives or be prepared for complete beelessness and starting over. "Many", of course, is open to interpretation, but it's not 1-2.

Re: "treatment treadmill"

libhart, you can also get on the "resistant queen treadmill" if the treatment treadmill is not to your liking. That can get expensive too. You're right though, once that special queen you bought dies, is superceded or a swarm issues from that hive, you have lost some resistance in the new queen that is raised, someone please correct me if I'm wrong on that but that's what I read somewhere. John

Re: "treatment treadmill"

JMGI,

What in my post (#118) implies you got dumber by going treatment free? I was not bashing it in anyway. To me, it's one of the most difficult routes to take in keeping bees and I was merely pointing out it seems a lot of new people with aboslutely zero experience in bees/insects or basic biological systems use it as an excuse to not learn about the maladies of bees as it doesn't matter to them since they're treatment free. I would assume since you treated when you started you took some time to diagnose symptoms, recognize mites/diseases, and understand how the teatments were designed to work hence gaining knowledge of what's going on with your bees and not just ignoring it.